December 17, 2014 -- submitted to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal by the author, first published on Truthout, December 10, 2014 -- In the propaganda campaign being waged by the NATO countries and the
government of Ukraine against Russia and in support of Kiev’s war in the
east of the country, the events in Crimea of the past nine months
occupy a pivotal place.

The secession from Ukraine that followed the March 16 referendum vote
in Crimea is the number one pretext to justify the war as well as
NATO’s rising aggression in Eastern Europe.

NATO began an eastward expansion 25 years ago at the time of the
collapse of the Soviet Union. It has incorporated 11 new member
countries (including eastern Germany) – 13 if Croatia and Albania are
counted.

NATO might be upsetting the entire military and political balance of
Europe by continuing to push eastward today in Ukraine, but the drumbeat
of Western government and media propaganda claims the heightened
tensions of this past year are all Russia’s fault. Russia’s supposed
annexation of Crimea in March is the example par excellence that a new
“Russian aggression”, harkening back to Soviet Union times, is afoot. It
must be stopped at all costs before Ukraine falls, too.

In this made-up world, Kiev’s murderous, illegal war against its own
population disappears. The war is an “ongoing conflict” between “armed
groups” in which the only actors with a purpose, it seems, are
“pro-Russian separatists” and their purported backer in Moscow. An
emerging subset of the theme of Crimea as victim of annexation is that
it’s also a land of disappearing human rights.

Given the very high stakes involved in all of this for the future of
Europe, if not the world, it is time to step back and examine what is
actually taking place in Crimea.

Fact from fiction

The Washington Post published an article on November 28 on
the situation in Crimea that is a good example of the part-fact,
mostly fiction and falsehood that prevail in so much of mainstream media
presentations of Russia, Ukraine and Crimea today.

The online edition
of the article has the ominous title, “Crimea is becoming more Russian –
and less hospitable to minorities”. The headline in the print edition
is “Crimea’s uneasy slide into Russification”. Neither headline is
proven in the published product. The “minorities” referred to in the
headline are ethnic Ukrainians, who constitute an estimated 24 per cent
of Crimea’s population of 2.4 million, and Tatars, a people of Muslim
faith who make up 12 per cent.

The Post article was reprinted in the Toronto Star,
Canada’s largest circulation daily newspaper. It likes to think of
itself as liberal. But the Star ceased to think and write for itself on
matters Ukraine some months ago. It borrows from newswires for its
coverage, selecting those stories that fit its editorial stand in
support of Kiev’s war and, echoing NATO, tell Russia that it should
police into submission the pro-autonomy, anti-austerity rebellion in
eastern Ukraine.

The daily UK Guardian published a similar article on November 25 in the form of a column by a pro-Western Russian writer.
The writer cites Refat Chubarov, a Tatar politician resident in
Ukraine, who says that Russia is preparing a “Chechen scenario” in
Crimea, that is, a bloody destructive war. Nothing in the article
provides the slightest suggestion of what would drive Russia to launch a
war in an otherwise peaceful territory.

Buzzfeedwent even further in September,
reporting that Crimea’s Tatars are facing a similar fate to the one
they suffered in 1944, when they were violently expelled en masse by
then-dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin.

The Post presents a very dark picture of Crimea today.
People of Ukrainian descent are worried they could soon be “wiped away”.
The Ukrainian language has “vanished” from schools. Ukrainian Orthodox
churches have become “havens” for the persecuted. The church is the
“only thing left” of the Ukrainian presence on the Crimean peninsula.
Priests have “fled”, and church authorities have been “forced” (by what
or by whom?) to close one-third of their congregations.

The article says a blogger is worried that police will “come for her”
because her blog and Facebook page are critical of the post-secession
political authorities. A few other residents of Crimea are introduced
who are evidently unhappy with the state of affairs in the region. But
the reasons for their unhappiness, and possibly that of many other
residents of Crimea, are entirely unclear.

It’s a grim picture. Unfortunately for the unknowing reader looking
to understand events, the picture is peppered with untruths and
exaggerations. And given the language barriers that separate Crimea from
the West, it is very difficult for all but the most highly informed (or
fluent in Russian or Ukrainian) reader to distinguish fact from
fiction.

Let’s start by clearing up the numerous factual inaccuracies in the
article. It is not true that Ukrainian language instruction has been
removed from schools. Nor has Tatar instruction. The opposite is the
case.

The change is that there are no longer any Ukrainian-only schools.
Crimea now has three official languages – Russian, Ukrainian and Tatar.
Before the changeover in March 2014, there was only one official
language – Ukrainian. Schooling in Ukrainian or in Tatar is guaranteed
on demand by parents (subject to reasonable limits on minimum numbers of
students).[1]

The minister of education of Crimea reports there are 20 schools with classes where all the disciplines are being taught in Ukrainian. One example
from a Crimean news report is the schools in the town of Feodosia,
where there are 8500 students. Of those, 139 are studying in Ukrainian
and 120 in Tatar.

Another example is in a November 14 news report in the All Crimea
news agency concerning a proposed renaming of the “Ukrainian Grammar
School” in the capital city Simferopol to the “Academic Gymnasium of
Simferopol”. School director Valentina Lavrik explains that the name
request came from a majority of parents. Parent assemblies play an
important role in the administration of the Russian education system.
The news agency reported in August that the teaching language of the
school would be Ukrainian for nine classes, serving 14 per cent of the
children in the school.

Textbooks in Ukrainian and Tatar, yes, are in short supply. That’s
because the school curriculum is now that of the Russian education
system. But textbooks are being translated into the other two official
languages. (Russian-language news report here.) In the meantime, teachers are doing their best, language-wise, with the new curriculum.

One of the problems of Tatar-language education today in Crimea is
the legacy of neglect and social underdevelopment of the region. Crimea
was an autonomous republic of Ukraine for 60 years. Tatars only began to
return to their homeland in large numbers in the late 1980s.

Underdevelopment also affected Ukrainian speakers. The Guardian Weeklyreported in November
that prior to secession from Ukraine, “not many courses were taught in
Ukrainian as it was”. This fits a general pattern of the failure of
successive, post-independence (1991) governments in Ukraine “to
adequately promote and develop Ukrainian language and culture, including
its very important regional and class-based dialects. (This July 2014 article by Ukrainian writer and editor Dmitry Kolesnik describes this challenge.)

The speaker of the Crimean State Council (legislative assembly), Vladimir Konstantinov, told the Kryminform news agency
that a key challenge today in improving Tatar language education and
government services is the absence of professional training inherited
from the past. “There is great demand for teachers and translators of
Tartar, and so the training should be organized for them.”

He went on, “Linguistic diversity is a responsibility of Crimea; it
is our policy. We have to support it and so it is necessary to spend the
necessary money and resources for the development of the Tatar,
Ukrainian and Russian languages at the state level.”

I will return to the subject of the legacy of Tatar oppression and discrimination in Ukraine later in the article.

Who is restricting travel?

The Washington Post article speaks of the difficulty of travel between
Crimea and Ukraine. It’s an important subject because there is no land
connection between Crimea and Russia except through Ukraine. The Post leaves the impression that travel obstacles are Russia’s fault. The opposite is the case.

Only holders of Ukraine-issued travel documents are permitted entry to Ukraine from Crimea. It is not true, as the Post
says, that holders of Ukrainian passports must relinquish them if they
apply for a Russian passport. Indeed, many Ukrainians rely on their dual
citizenship and passports to access social services or receive pensions
in both countries. This can be lifesaving for the poorest members of
the Ukrainian population.

Residents of Crimea who are Ukrainian citizens are either required to
apply for Russian citizenship or, if they choose not to do so and wish
to remain a resident in Crimea, they must apply for a permanent
residency permit. Human Rights Watch calls this a “coercive” measure,
but it sounds very similar to how most countries in the world register
those who are resident within their borders.

Human Rights Watch has reported recently that Ukrainian passport
holders entering Ukraine from Crimea who are discovered to also hold
Russian passports are refused entry.

Meanwhile, foreigners are not permitted entry to Ukraine without
special permission because Ukraine does not recognise Crimea as an
international entity with which it shares corresponding border
procedures. Ukraine cut air travel to Crimea last February.

There is a train service. It is heavily policed by Ukrainian authorities. In October, a US journalist with the weekly Workers World newspaper, Greg Butterfield, was refused entry to Ukraine
in the middle of the night while travelling by train. He was placed on
the next train back to Crimea. An Orwellian twist to the experience was
that the border guards assumed him to be a tourist. Presumably, since
Ukraine says the political/geographic entity of the new Crimea does not
exist, it cannot allow a tourist to cross a “non-existent” border from
“nowhere”. Or something like that.

Church persecution?

The Washington Post suggests there is persecution of the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church taking place in Crimea today. But it provides no
specific evidence. The examples it does cite are misleading or dubious.

It says church congregations have closed. Yes, but this includes the
congregations attached to Ukrainian military bases that were closed when
the transition to Russia took place. (Many Ukrainian military personnel
opted to stay in the refounded Crimea and join the Russian military).

Additionally, an estimated 20,000 people have opted to move to
Ukraine. (Of that number, there are an estimated 4000 to 5000 Tatars,
out of the total Crimean Tatar population of 300,000.)

The article claims that 12 per cent of Crimea’s population are
adherents of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, but no source is cited. (The
Ukrainian Orthodox Church was a split in 1992 with the Moscow-based
patriarchy of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The new branch did not become
dominant in Ukraine as it hoped.)

How do Crimeans view matters?

Few statistics or overall information on social and economic conditions in Crimea are provided in the Washington Post
article or others like it. But the article does say that economic
conditions for residents of the region have improved in important
respects. The pensions, social services and other public services
provided by the Russian Federation are much better financed than those
of Ukraine. Meanwhile (not reported in the Post), the Russian
government is investing billions of rubles (approximately 50 rubles per
US dollar) in social and economic infrastructure in Crimea, and it is
encouraging capitalist economic investment, including finding new
markets for Crimean goods to counter the economic embargo that Europe
and North America imposed against the region beginning last March.

One very big change taking place is the confiscation of large
enterprises of the bourgeoisie of Ukraine that previously dominated the
economy. Particularly targeted are the billionaire Ukrainians who are
financing the war in eastern Ukraine. The biggest loser is Igor
Kolomoisky, the notorious billionaire and financier of right-wing
parties and militias. He dominates the economy and political life of the
region of Dnipropetrovsk in southern Ukraine and owns Ukraine’s largest
bank, PrivatBank. The bank’s 65 branches in Crimea have been
confiscated.

Though the takeovers are being described in some quarters as
“nationalisations”, many of the enterprises will be sold to Russian
entrepreneurs.

Dmitry Kolesnik has travelled to Crimea all his life, and he says that
improvements in the social wage in Crimea are offsetting the declines
in agriculture, tourism and industry caused by the embargo. He says, “In
general, there are many problems in Crimea, especially due to the
difficult and expensive transport connections. But still, the majority
have much higher salaries and pensions, while prices are still lower
than in Russia.”

The New York Times’ Neil MacFarquhar wrote on July 7,
“The annexation still retains broad support in Crimea, since the many
Russians living there yearned to be part of the motherland.”

That same month, British-Ukrainian-Russian writer and actress Vera
Graziadei travelled to Crimea to investigate how Crimeans were viewing
the political changes. She was intensely interested because she has
travelled to Crimea every year of her life. She encountered different
viewpoints among the people of different ethnicities to whom she spoke.
But overall, her findings were summarised in the headline of an
extensive written report that she published on her website in September. It was titled, “Crimeans are happier to be a part of Russia than Russians themselves.”

The inference here by the Post writer is that the resident
speaks for many. Indeed, the writer says, “But many Crimeans are happy
to be part of Russia, even if the initial euphoria has dissipated. Some
welcome once again being part of a Russian nation to which they always
felt connected. Others hold out hope for new economic opportunities.
Many say that if it weren’t for Russia’s intervention, they would have
had the same bloody experience as eastern Ukraine ...”

Here the cat is being let out of the bag. At the end of 2012 and
beginning of 2013, Crimeans, like many other people in Ukraine, were
watching with dismay or horror the ascendance of the extreme right in
the protest movement across western Ukraine, called Euromaidan. The
maelstrom of violence that unfolded on Maidan Square in Kiev saw the
government in power try to suppress the protest movement by force. The
neoconservative and extreme-right leaders of the movement and their
extreme-right shock troops responded with their own force. Ultimately,
they overthrew the elected president, Victor Yanukovych, in late
February.

Following the overthrow, as happened even more sharply in eastern
Ukraine, armed and violent right-wing and fascist militias began to
enter Crimea to impose by violence the “new order” of the new
government, namely, its sharp and destructive turn toward austerity and
economic association with Europe, which would, in turn, provoke a
rupture of economic and other ties to Russia. This looming threat of
civil war coming from the new government in Kiev and the right wing and
fascist militias that the government leaned upon for support prompted a
quick secession referendum in Crimea on March 16. The referendum was
organized by the elected legislative assembly of Crimea.

Russia had considerable stake in the unfolding events. Its lease
agreement with Ukraine for its Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol was
threatened by the new government’s stated intention of joining the NATO
fold. But the argument that events amounted to a “Russian annexation” is
dogma, not fact.

Yes, Russia acted clumsily. It pretended it was playing no role in
facilitating the decision of Crimea’s assembly to hold the referendum.
But few serious observers doubt that, even with its haste and democratic
imperfections, the “yes” vote for secession reflected the desire of
Crimea’s majority to take a pass on Kiev’s course.

Ukraine is today playing its part in the economic squeeze of Crimea, as the Washington Post
reports. Ukrainians who enter Crimea can bring only limited cash with
them. Ukraine banks are not honouring the accounts of customers. (Similar
moves have been taken by Kiev in southeast Ukraine as part of the
attempt to “cleanse” the region of its Russian-language majority.)

Ukraine has also restricted the flow of water into Crimea via the
large canal that was built as part of the post-WW2 effort. Crimea is an
arid region and its agriculture depends heavily on water diverted from
rivers in Ukraine.

History and legacy

One of the great ironies of Kiev’s and NATO’s declarations about
Crimea today is that they are demanding a return to the political status
of Crimea that was decided 60 years ago by the Soviet Union. That was a
process that was anything but democratic. Administration of Crimea was
switched from the Russian Soviet Federation to the Ukrainian one in 1954
as a measure to facilitate the costly and difficult process of
post-World War II reconstruction. The peninsula was one of the bloodiest
battlegrounds of the German Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union during
World War II, and it suffered horribly under Nazi occupation.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of
independent Ukraine in 1991, living standards in the new country
declined and have never recovered to the levels of the late Soviet era
for ordinary citizens. In Russia, meanwhile, living standards have risen
from the depths of the post-Soviet collapse and are far higher today
than in Ukraine. This is largely thanks to buoyant prices of the vast
natural resources of Russia that the new class of entrepreneurs
(“oligarchs”) sell on the world market.

The Washington Post article is careful to not examine the social and economic conditions prevailing in Crimea before
the decision in March to secede, including the conditions of the Tatar
minority. That’s because it would challenge the narrative of a Crimea
spiralling downward. As described earlier, with respect to education
services, the people of the peninsula and the new governing authorities
inherit conditions of considerable social underdevelopment and national
rights violations.

Writing in December 2012,
an American Peace Corps volunteer living in Crimea said that the
education system for Tatars at the time was very poor. Only 5 per cent
of Tatar children speak the language, said the writer.

Tatar was not an officially recognised language in Ukraine, and the
Tatar people had no recognition in the country’s constitution granting
meaningful powers. Prior to 1998, explained the Peace Corps writer,
there was no Tatar language school instruction in Crimea. A number of
schools were established that year that began to teach in Tatar. By
2008, 3472 pupils were enrolled.

It wasn’t only education service that was lacking for Tatars. Their national rights as a whole were not recognised. A 2009 article in the Eurasian Daily Monitor reported:

The anniversary [May 18, date of commemoration of the 1944
deportations of Tatars from Crimea by the wartime Soviet Union]
coincided with the first World Congress of Crimean Tatars, attended by
800 delegates from 11 countries. The congress, held in the famous
Bakhchysaray palace [in Crimea] ... released the pent up frustrations
felt by Crimean Tatars who are dissatisfied with the manner in which
they have been treated by successive Ukrainian governments. Throughout
much of May, the Crimean Tatar protestors stood outside the cabinet of
ministers’ office in Kiev demanding greater attention for their economic
and social plight.

Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev, a veteran Soviet dissident,
complained that no legislation has ever been adopted in Ukraine to
reinstate the social and legal rights of his people (Voice of America
Russian service, May 18). The World Congress called upon the Ukrainian
president and prime minister, “to take urgent steps to deliver on all
the previously reached agreements, and your instructions and promises
regarding the fair resolution of land disputes in Crimea and providing
Crimean Tatars with land”

All of the infrastructure of the Crimean Tatars up to their 1944
deportation – theatres, schools, mosques and other buildings – were
expropriated by the Soviet regime and have not been returned ...

Dzhemilev went on to acquire a seat in the Rada courtesy of the
less-than-democratic procedure whereby approximately half the seats in
the body are accorded to those electoral machines (“parties,” if you
will) that obtain 5 per cent or more of the vote at election time. The
party seats are accorded by vote result. Dzhemilev was “re-elected” to
the Rada on October 26 of this year as part of the “Petro Poroshenko
Bloc”. He is a harsh critic of the “Russian occupation” of Crimea and
argues that Tatars have nothing to fear from the right-wing government
in Kiev or the ascendant forces of the far right on which it leans for
support.

Dzhemilev is also a former head of the Mejlis, a commission of the
historic Tatar assembly which is called the Kurultai. The Mejlis’
present claim to represent Tatars is sharply challenged by other Tatar
institutions. Dzhemilev and current Mejlis head Refat Chubarov have been
barred from entry to Crimea because they are accused of fomenting civil
strife, if not civil war.

Changes

In 2012, the Ukraine government introduced a language law which made
changes to the 1996 constitution. It granted undefined status to
“regional languages” in defined areas where minority language speakers
constitute more than 10 per cent of the population. The law provoked
sharp protests from right-wing (and pro-Europe) nationalists in Ukraine,
including fistfights in the Rada during its adoption. The protests
against the law were incredibly ironic because the measure was a
response by the government of the day to insistence by the European
Union that Ukraine adhere to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. That’s a convention that accords status to “unofficial” languages in Europe.

The first act of the Rada following the overthrow of Yanukovych in
February 2014 was to repeal the 2012 language law. That was huge
political blunder and an embarrassment to “democratic” Europe, US and
Canada, which had backed the overthrow. The post-overthrow interim
president vetoed the measure on February 28.

In Crimea, meanwhile, a new constitution proposed in March 2014 and
ratified in April declared Russian, Ukrainian and Tatar as official
languages. Before that, Russian and Tatar were recognised languages of
the Crimean constitution. The territory was an autonomous republic of
Ukraine with its own constitution, albeit subordinate to Ukraine constitution and law.

Ukraine was and remains an officially unilingual country,
notwithstanding the very large Russian minority that lives there and the
fact that Russian is the de facto language of work, government service
and the street for much of the country.

Also in Crimea, a new law was adopted in March, “On guarantees of
resurrection of the rights for Crimean Tartar people and integration in
Crimean community.” (Russian language report here).
It was drafted in consultation with officials of the Republic of
Tatarstan, one of the constituents of the Russian Federation.

The law is sweeping in scope. It opens the door to recognition and
application of the rights of the deportees and descendants of 1944,
including a recuperation of lost property. It grants the Tatar language
official status and provides for Tatar representation of 20 per cent in
the governing executive power. It proposes to restore and promote the
cultural and historical institutions of the nationality. The law
proposes a five-year plan to implement all this.

The Russian Federation has formally recognised the 1944 deportation as an historic crime. This was voiced by Vladimir Putin in March of this year and formally recognised by Russia’s parliament on May 16.

The new law recognises the Kurultai institution. It is to meet at
least once per month. A broad Public Council of the Crimean Tatar People
was struck in early November and one of its duties is to organise an
election to the Kurultai. The council includes representatives of more
than 20 social, political and cultural organisations of the Tatar
population.

Prospects

Does all of this mean smooth sailing for the Crimean people and its
Tatar minority? It would be naïve to think so. The region inherits a
legacy of economic and social underdevelopment and is suffering an
economic embargo. There is a now-permanent NATO military threat against
its existence. It has no land connection to Russia. Civil war is raging
in neighbouring Ukraine, and if Crimea were to let down its guard, civil
war would be visited upon it by the right-wing government in Kiev and
its allied, right-wing militias.

Crimea is under an intense propaganda bombardment by international
and Ukrainian media. Dmitry Kolesnik explains, “Ukrainian media are
constantly reporting that Crimea faces ‘hunger, … empty shops, ...
empty tourism beaches,’ although I saw nothing of the sort during my
recent visit. The media constantly invent the most fantastic stories,
never verified by sources. All this is under an intense regime of press
censorship.”

While membership in the Russian Federation brings economic advantages
to Crimea compared to Ukraine, capitalist Russia is a “managed
democracy” in which political and social rights are tightly managed and
restricted (not so different than the situation in the West, but that’s
another story). Recent reports by Human Rights Watch (in October and November)
and by Amnesty International last May on the situation in Crimea are
full of hyperbole and unfounded accusations, but they do raise serious
concerns about harassment, intimidation and possibly worse directed at
those who are unhappy with the new political and social order in Crimea.

Concerns are being raised within the Tatar population over the slow
pace of implementation of legal and constitutional changes. The chair
of the “Filli Firka” social rights organisation, Enver Cantemir-Umerov,
says the changes made earlier this year and reaffirmed during the September
14 election to the Crimean regional assembly are not being met. (Russian
language report here.)

All this said, the challenges facing Crimea are nothing in comparison
to the disaster north of its border. A bloody war is being waged in
eastern Ukraine by Kiev, with NATO backing. The war is accompanied by a
harsh clampdown on democratic rights throughout the country, including
paramilitary gangs that violently assault public expressions of
discontent and protests by journalists
against a new thought-control “information ministry” of the government.
Austerity measures ordered by international lenders in Europe are
biting hard. The new minister of finance is a US citizen formerly employed by the US State Department.

Biased Western media keeps pumping out the message that “It’s
Russia, stupid” and that Crimea is sliding into something resembling a
Soviet gulag. That’s because the NATO countries’ goal of weakening
Russia and crushing the anti-austerity rebellion that has arisen in
eastern Ukraine depends upon having a propagandised, misinformed and
unengaged public at home.

But the game of lies and deception is slowly coming undone. The sane
world needs to turn its attention to how best to assist the Ukrainian
people to recover from the current crisis and put their country onto a
new path of social justice and national and language equality.

Notes

[1]. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has announced that he
will bring a proposal to the recently elected Rada that reaffirms
Ukrainian as the only official language of the country. It’s not clear
how that might change the 2012 law.

Comments

It would appear that now might be a good time to organize an international observed referendum to counter the myths of the imperialists and the soft left Ukrainian nationalists. I have no doubt what so ever that a vote in favour of incorporating the Crimea into Russia would pass overwhelmingly, and that the addition of the foreign observers would provide the necessary media spotlight on the reality of Crimea-Ukraine relations.

Why socialists and communist alike do ignore peaceseeking Putins politics of suppression censorship and his capitalist methods? Because he lives in a mock "communist" state? Is it not truth that everyone knows Putin idealizes Stalin and not Lenin. These days I am reading a revealing book of Trotsky about Stalin. Trotski and Lenin where idealists and visionairs, one can like them or not, but Stalin and Putin reveal both oppurtunist minds that can neither produce, nor perceive big ideas, and espescially ideals seem not their "piece of cake". Did you ever hear Putin utter socialist ideals? No, he surpresses them, partly also because for him, as well for other capitalists, it is a danger to maintainance of power. Why not showing solidarity with the socialist intellectuals in Russia and Ukraine alike? That would be far more productive for a socialist future of Europe and Russia.

The support of Crimean self determination is an active policy of all who profess to be socialists. It was precisely Stalin's active suppression of that right which, among other things, has led to the historical amalgam of Ukrainian, Polish and other nationalisms with anti-communism. Just as the Ukrainian people have the right of self-determination, those other peoples now or formerly residing within the boundaries of the Ukrainian state are equally entitled to the same right.

One cannot separate the active support for the principle of self-determination from the struggle for the proletarian dictatorship in Ukraine, Russia, and all the other countries of the former Soviet Union. The emergence of the mini-states of the DPR, LPR, etc., are a living example of this fact, which mirrors the form the proletarian revolution took in 1917-18 in Ukraine itself.